The Danger and Disability

Introduction: Heidegger on His Head

It is admittedly difficult to ascertain the warning latent in Heidegger’s late work on technology in a manner that can implicate how humans engage in politics. Heidegger’s affiliation in his brief rectorate does more than make this a problematic endeavor, it often makes it a dangerous one. However, ontology carries with it immediate political consequences. But it is specifically this one political tenor in Heidegger’s work on technology that remains consistent: the implication of the management of human life through enframing. This also includes the normalization and standardization of existence, and the hastening of the foreclosure of the possibility of mindfulness/reflection, as well as proposing the question of the meaning of being (which is not of concern to us). What technology does, and explicitly enframing/positionality, is render beings intelligible and therefore manipulable. All that is characteristic of a given being is occluded other than what is manipulable in the human’s mastery over beings. The world truly becomes a workshop, and not in the manner of a liberal existentialism that provides a gleeful human projection of possibility – such possible avenues are limited to the optimization of life. What Heidegger discovers, perhaps before Hannah Arendt or Michel Foucault, is that human life itself is put “at stake” in a new way in modernity’s “world picture.”

While these assertions in “The Question Concerning Technology” can be startling, especially if one is a proponent of an approach to Heideggerianism in a way that prioritizes his early work (like Graham Harman in Tool Being), they are not a complete rupture in the Heideggerian oeuvre. The “dangers” quietly manifest across his work, long before Heidegger delivers the Bremen lectures. The “supreme danger,” though articulated only later in his enigmatically terse and intentionally opaque “Question Concerning Technology,” is already nascently lurking in certain passages of his early magnum opus Being and Time. As certain Heidegger scholars, such as Reiner Schurmann, have attempted to demonstrate, reading Heidegger “backward” may be of use when attempting to grasp the implications of Heidegger’s engagement with technology and cybernetics (Cesare 2018, 16). Starting first with the Heidegger of the history of metaphysics, rather than the Heidegger of The History of the Concept of Time and Being and Time can show precisely how the stakes of Heidegger’s project are solidified retrospectively. Heidegger’s works must be flipped. In doing so, a new field of problems emerges; a field that reveals the eugenic core of metaphysics.

In attempting to extract this thread of consistency as it pertains to technology and the implication of life (and its enframing), one will have to first work through how technology becomes a “mode of revealing” that does not unfold in a poiesis, but rather in a “challenging forth” of nature (Heidegger 1977, 14). This will necessarily have to lead to a bracketing off of a particular element of Heidegger’s work on the history of metaphysics; specifically, the advent of industrial technology. However, what will need to also be made clear is how the various dangers of each epoch carry with it a particular fragment of the supreme danger. A distinction between these successive dangers and the supreme danger will also be crucial here. Next, we will have to focus on what becomes of the human being in the history of metaphysics and specifically in modernity. The threshold of modernity sees a transformation of the human being that the human being supposedly themself oversees, in the name of a kind of mastery of the world. After this, looking backwards, a brief foray into the early sections of Being and Time on “referential totality,” equipment recession, and circumspection will first allow us to get a glimpse at the process through which Dasein enters into readiness-to-hand and backs away from it through an interruption or a becoming-conspicuous. The revealing of the in-order-to exposes a mode of insertion of the human being. And while, in the new light that the later Heidegger can shed on these passages, this may be enough to show a technical continuity of the workshop or “projects,” this would not be sufficient. This would still be in the realm of the “handcraftsman” and the technique which holds for “Greek thought” (Heidegger 1977, 13). This Heidegger, alone, does not “fit modern machine-powered technology” (Heidegger 1977, 13-14). This Heidegger is still too Greek. “We are much less Greeks than we believe” (Foucault 1977, 216). It is only in conjunction with another concept in Being and Time that the danger which implicates and (eugenically) normalizes the human being can be revealed: das Man. It is in his presentation of the “They” (or the “one”) where Heidegger explicitly engages with how a population becomes knowable and managed through a particular approach to presence. Furthermore, it is here where one starts to see a different mode of revealing that is entirely predicated on a normalization or abstraction through “leveling-down” and presenting life in its everyday disburdened “averageness” (Heidegger 1962, 125). The “they” also provides an interpretive framework that shares a resonance with technology’s mode of revealing. Heidegger’s work on technology, in this very specific sense, is consistent and cogent, but perhaps sporadic.

However, these are the stakes of Heidegger’s account of the history of metaphysics. Doubtlessly these are the stakes of ontology as such. As Giorgio Agamben attests, ontology “is not some innocuous academic discipline,” but “the fundamental operation in which the […] becoming human of the living being is realized” (Agamben 2004, 79). Finally, we will examine one of Heidegger’s most well-known apostles, Bernard Stiegler. It is precisely through normalizing power and the technology of eugenics that we find a cohesive account of technology in Heidegger.

The Field of Intelligibility and the Danger

After an Aristotelian interlude, Heidegger arrives at a fundamental assertion about technology that will guide his (and this) articulation of the “danger” lurking in this particular metaphysical epoch. It centers around technology’s mode of revealing (aletheia). Technology is not merely the “application of modern mathematical physical science to praxis” (Heidegger 1977, 116). Revealing has “everything” to do with technology’s essence (Heidegger 1977, 12). Every bringing-forth is characterized, or “grounded”, in a revealing. However, in order to get a better sense of the stakes of this revealing, it is helpful to take stock of how such revealing has occurred for Heidegger within the history of metaphysics. If every bringing-forth is ultimately grounded in a particular mode of revealing, then the given metaphysical epoch is going to be pertinent in discussing how such things become intelligible and manipulable. “Metaphysics grounds an age,” meaning that under any particular metaphysical regime, what populates any given field of phenomena—what is brought forth—is determined by that regime. How things participate in the real, what they are rendered intelligible as, is mediated by the given metaphysical presuppositions of that age. This is not completely unlike Foucault’s analyses of epistemes in his monumental The Order of Things (which could indeed be read as a kind of history of being). When Heidegger says that it “grounds” an age, it is important to make it clear that for Heidegger these metaphysical presuppositions do not simply impact supplemental philosophical endeavors, like local ontologies, but impact everything from the religious experience to the “physical” sciences. If a metaphysical epoch determines what and how things come forward, all subsequent engagements are going to be predicated off of that particular demand from that metaphysical framework.

Heidegger sees in modern machine technology a culminating point in the history of metaphysics. Machine technology is the “most visible outgrowth” of its essence and, crucially, that essence is identical with the “essence of modern metaphysics” (Heidegger 1977, 116). Metaphysics holds a dominion over “all the phenomena that distinguish the age”. It is that which determines the process of revealing. But modern technology’s mode of revealing is specific, what is rendered intelligible, what becomes a circumscribed “phenomenon” only presents itself through a “challenging” which places a “demand” upon that given being. What is revealed is only revealed as that which can be manipulated and exploited to technological ends. All are reduced to their respective relationship to the referential totality of production. Rivers become the current for hydroelectric plants, agriculture becomes the productive basin of mechanized food production, the earth becomes a repository for ore, ore becomes the potentiality to yield uranium, and “uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy” (Heidegger 1977, 15). Everything passes through the metaphysical apparatus that orders it into a “standing reserve.” This standing reserve is not just a “mere ‘stock’”, though it doubtlessly is that too (17). Far more importantly, it “designates nothing less” than the manner through which beings manifest characteristically through modern technology’s challenging mode of revealing. It places things before us as this standing reserve. This does not just apply to what the history of philosophy historically calls “objects” as opposed to subjects, the very same thing occurs in “human resources” and the “supply of patients for a clinic” (18). But this ordered mode of revealing cannot be reduced to some shift in human comportment (though there are ethical implications).

Modern technology itself demands of the human an active participation in ordering the standing reserve. The human is called upon to place all that presents itself to us as standing-reserve, it puts it in the position of immediate intelligibility.^[1] The human is fully implicated as something to be ordered and that which orders. Such a rendering operative of beings also implicates the human in its very own historicity. History becomes something accessible in the very same mode through which other beings are laid immediately before us in their supposedly naked utility. This revealing which makes something “destined,” is not simply fate – it is more subtly malicious. To speak of “inevitability” is to merely be speaking in the register of metaphysics as such (deterministic or otherwise). This is what Heidegger refers to as a “danger”. But here we can be a little simpler and free ourselves from his jargon. The human being is endangered by destining simply because it forecloses on a different use of beings, a different engagement with the world. The human, thinking they have achieved mastery over the world, is truly just standing at attention in accordance with the demand to order the world in relation to the standing reserve. The entire world becomes a factory, with its overhead, output, energetics of labor, etc. The most “revolutionary” of politics, the most stringent of communists, if still dependent on viewing the world in relation to capacities and utilities, will always promise ruin and reproduce that which underwrites capitalism itself: work and production. All is reduced to its relation to the circulation of productive forces. And this is one side of the two-fold “supreme” danger. It is that “precipitous fall” where the human being is taken as “standing reserve” (Heidegger 1977, 27).

Das Man and the Danger: Enframing and Normalizing Power

There is an existentially expansive depiction of the use of technology in Being and Time that is often merely placed alongside the analytic of Dasein, in both its readiness to hand and presentness at hand. Technology moves in and out of conspicuousness as one hammers away at a nail or sends an angry text message to an ex-lover; the hammer breaks, the iPhone with a cracked screen finally gives out and the successive “towards-this”s reveal themselves in an almost Thomistic chain of causal necessity until the “world announces itself” (Heidegger 1962, 105). We have reached a kind of totality in conspicuousness. In readiness-to-hand, however, an image of Dasein in its everyday fallenness floats through. And with this analytic of everydayness a possibility of transposing tools allows us to grasp what is far more material and, frankly, more modern in Heidegger’s work.

This account of the ready-to-hand that is fractured by a conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, or obstinacy is certainly something with its own conceptual merit through how it reveals the environment within which Dasein “dwells,” not against, but amongst and within the world. However, this is not the approach to human instrumentality and operativity that is quietly at stake. It is not until one reaches Heidegger’s account of the everyday Being-with, which is “ontologically different from Being towards Things which are present-at-hand” that one can begin to sense Heidegger’s critical engagement with technology – in the broader sense of the term. It is crucial to recognize how Heidegger comparatively situates the “self” in relation to “Others” and Dasein in relation to the world ontologically. Being-in, for Heidegger, always already presupposes “Being-with Others” (Heidegger 1962, 154-155). There are two fundamental forms of Being-with-one-another. The first form he articulates through an example: individuals hired to complete a task or engage in some form of labor. This form “often thrives only on mistrust” (159). The other form involves Dasein engaged in some affair in common, but “each in its own way” (Heidegger 1962, 163). It is here where Heidegger introduces the “they”. The “they” comes to the reader almost as a phantom or ghost in the social machine. Dasien stands in “subjection” to it (164). They are encountered as what they do – it is a mechanics of sociality. These Others that Heidegger describes here are not a set of “definite Others”. However, this “they” is infinitely representable. Anyone can represent them. The “they” manifests as a series of practices, a mode of discourse, and dispositions. But what cannot be missed is that the “they” also validates and invalidates these various modes as well. In Heidegger’s 1925 lecture materials, das Man (translated as “the ‘Anyone’”) functions to ensure that “[e]very exception is short-lived” (Heidegger 1985, 246). This implicates Dasein, to the point of even altering its mode of care through what Heidegger calls “distantiality.” It is through distantiality that “one’s own concern is regarded as more or less outstanding, backward, appreciated, or the like” (Heidegger 1985, 244). There is a “constant care as to the way one differs […], whether that difference is merely one that is to be evened out”, or whether “one’s own Dasien has lagged behind” (Heidegger 1962, 163). As Gilles Deleuze once attested in his monograph on Foucault, all machines are social before they are technical.^[2] But one should get more specific in this comparison.

The “they” has a mode of revealing that is not fundamentally distinct from the destining mode of revealing depicted in Heidegger’s work explicitly on technology. The “they” keeps a watchful, normalizing, eye (in other words, we in modernity keep such a watchful eye) over “everything” exceptional. Under this ocular capture, all avenues of going astray are closed off. Importantly, all that is “primordial” finds itself “glossed over as something that has been long well known.” Under the eye of this normalizing force, everything becomes “just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force.” This combination of different tendencies becomes what Heidegger calls publicness. “Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right” (Heidegger 1962, 165). The “dictatorship” of the “they” imposes a mode of discourse and, importantly, a mode of revealing and interpreting the world. This is exactly what technology’s essence, enframing/positionality, does. Beyond this, Heidegger’s account of social production also implicates the human being in a comparable way. One has to look no further than how Heidegger depicts the “they” engaging with modern technology. “In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is exactly like the next” (164). Everything is leveled-down, or, through distantiality, established as exceptional, and therefore in a relation to everyday averageness. The human being is rendered eminently replaceable, completely knowable, and therefore entirely manipulable. One could say for Heidegger that it is through das Man that the “specialized science of domination” masquerading as the scientific mastery of the world becomes possible (Debord 1970, §42). Such sciences like sociology, psychotechnology, and cybernetics depend on the normalization and massification of given populations. Beneath this dictatorship, “[e]veryone is the other, and no one is himself” (165).

Eugenic Modernity and Reflection

It is not through Heidegger’s analysis of broken hammers or existential projects connected to the referential totality that one gets a glimpse of the stakes of his critique of technology, but through his account of the production of a public (or, one could say in the register of a speculative biopolitics, a population). There is an anxiety that is tacit throughout Heidegger’s work. There is a horrific image of the human being perpetually submitting itself to its own operativity; whether that be the reduction of the human to a “rational animal” or the reduction of its essence to “work.” So long as the human being continues to be subject to an essentialization that is isomorphic with the process of production, and not just a given (commodified) mode of production, the logic of optimization persists.

The optimization of the human being is always predicated on the promise of the elimination of that which is not optimal. The “rational organization of productive society,” is only ever possible through the production and isolation of the irrational, and the elimination of what is “unproductive.” It is worth noting that in the appendices of “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger singles out a strange dangerous contemporary of his, Ernst Jünger.

He explicitly cites Jünger’s concept of “total mobilization,” which is the total conversion of the population into a combative life-force. Jünger’s “Total Mobilization” is the byproduct of a rendering of life that reduces “each individual life” into “the life of a worker” (Jünger 1991, 128). Total mobilization is the complete reinterpretation of totally enframed beings. The population is rendered intelligible exclusively at the level of combat effectiveness and efficacy in production. All are reduced to workers – and to their collective labor-power which is to be leveraged against the state’s enemies. But there is another side to this development. With a population rendered as a biological mass, a vital mass, any entities that threaten it, threaten it in its entirety. It is that period in 1914 where Foucault’s biopolitics finds its first crude exemplification. So long as the human is correspondent with an energetics of production, such reductions remain fundamental to modernity. It is this reduction that is essential to our contemporary eugenic condition. The same logic that upholds the biopolitical management of the population is at work in productivist politics that places the empty subject position of the “worker” at the core of its political program.

Reflection places one into “that ‘between’ in which” one “belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is” (Heidegger 1977, 136). This creative questioning is never one that sets down a definitive metaphysical doctrine or essence, but instead works perpetually to understand and overturn metaphysical apparatuses that constrain.

Reflection is at once a creative endeavor and a fundamental refusal. The task of reflection in the face of eugenic modernity is not only to resist biopolitical operations that disallow life to the point of death, in the name of protecting the population and its production, though this is crucial. More fundamentally it means attempting to uncover the limits of the metaphysical apparatuses that render life as an object of knowledge.

Technology and Constitution: On Stiegler

There have been multiple attempts to engage in such “piety of thought” regarding technology. One we will single out here, in closing, is Stiegler’s remarkably delicate and extensive treatment of technology through the myth of Prometheus and his (fittingly) forgotten and villainized brother, Epimetheus. The fault of Epimetheus, in his decisions regarding the attribution of capacities to particular animals, is forgetting to provide such a definable capacity to the human being. Understanding what Epimetheus and Prometheus, in each of their “faults” lend to humanity. What it means to be a human being is fundamentally changes under Stiegler’s new analysis of Dasein’s equiprimordiality. Stiegler’s scholarship of both the history of anthropology, and his careful reading of a problematic thinker like Heidegger necessitates a comparably delicate and slow approach to key passages in the recasting of the double fault of Epimetheus and Prometheus. There are always risks in attempting to give a constituent point to any being, but particularly the human being.

Epimetheus’s forgetting^[3] is the very condition of the human being’s finitude and therefore the condition of necessity for technics. The tale of Epimetheus and Prometheus is, above all, a tale of anthropogenesis. It is one mode of understanding who we are and how we relate to who we are in our historicity.

Epimetheus is engaged in a strange task, he is responsible for attributing “suitable powers [dynameis]” to living creatures. A kind of ecological balance is struck. Some are armed with claws, others speed to outrun such weaponry. There is a “principle of compensation” achieved for all but the human being, who is left nude with no suitable powers or capacities that allow it to be a contender – or more crucially, to exist. Epimetheus was at a loss as to what to do with these human beings. Prometheus augments them by providing “ten enteken sophian (skill in the arts)” and fire. “In this way man had sufficient means to keep himself alive” (Prot. 320d-322a).

Before Prometheus steals from the gods, the fault of Epimetheus sets the conditions for that which is going to be co-constitutive of the entirety of the equiprimordial structure of Dasein (in this case the human being). Humans occur only in their being abandoned to incapacitation. They are only enabled to appear by “disappearing” (Stiegler 1998, 188).

This is a double fault; each one necessitates the other for the genesis of the human being. In a somewhat Derridean tone, Stiegler attests that there “will have been no appearance except through disappearance. Everything will have taken place at the same time, in the same step” (Stiegler 1998, 188). This is the “eternal melancholy” of the human being that is suspended between the realm of beasts and gods (Stiegler 1998, 190). It is only through their abandoned state that they come forth.

Humanity must produce qualities, it is that gift of the demand of techne that is the “lot of humans” (Stiegler 1998, 193). The cultivation of these qualities does not necessitate that these will be crucial to the anthropogenic event (which is both already constituted and never occurring), instead they “may rather become technics” (Stiegler 1998, 194). If “[r]eligion, speech, politics, invention” are all an effect of this, we finally arrive at the answer to a question about Dasein’s worldedness: “What is the human world insofar as worldedness is always already technicity, technical power, activity” (Stiegler 1998, 91).

This raises several questions, but the most important one comes down to the question of power, potentiality, and capacity. Irrespective of the ontological arguments there are immediate political effects to preoccupying oneself with the interplay of capacity and incapacity. If humanity in Epimetheus’s “stupidity” and “imbecility”, incapacitated in such a way that constitutes its capacities, then human beings are necessarily always already a part of the referential totality. That on its own is not particularly concerning. But there is a far simpler issue, one that haunts all of the history of philosophy, not just Stiegler. This question of what a capacity is, and, more importantly, has historically been, remains almost completely unexamined politically. If human worldedness is always-already a question of technicity, power, and activity—as Stiegler suggests—then humanity is itself rendered a technical operative being.

Reflection as the Refusal of Operativity

As we stand in the ruins of history, a history where the vanquishers have not “ceased to be victorious” (and even had Martin Heidegger among them), it is crucial not to lose proverbial grasp of the simple fact that the “world” could be, and is, otherwise. Perhaps the challenge of our epoch, is not necessarily to find a means of “collectivizing” and leveraging labor-power, but to refuse the very processes, institutions, and metaphysical apparatuses that render us as mere harbingers of labor-power. And this is where an ethics of refusal is found in reflection. “Reflection finds Being in its most extreme resistance” (Heidegger 1977, 137).

For Stiegler, there is a “pressing need” for a politics of memory (Stiegler 1998, 276). But this memory is a recollection that occurs only through the recognition of a technic-constituted human being. So long as human beings remain definable through capacities (metaphysically recognized in the history of being or not), there continues to be a void at the center of the ontological assertion that produces the human as a distinct and exceptional entity. The human is excepted now through its capacities – irrespective of their dependencies on incapacity. But what an ability actually is has remained completely unexamined. For Stiegler, it seems to be the privation of a dis-ability. But again, these assertions remain unexamined.

Certainly, a particular kind of politics of memory is needed, and it could provide a mode of resistance to projective (often destructive) projects like longtermism and “effective” accelerationism. It would have to be a history of metaphysics that Heidegger failed to deliver, because it would have to set aside the forgottenness of Being in favor of the production of optimizable beings. However, beneath the call to examine the impact technology has on the collective memory, there is a serious need for a politics of (dis)ability. In this way there is a shared problematic between the account of Heidegger on technology and Stiegler on the constitutive role of technics, that this post-industrial age puts us perpetually at risk of reducing human beings to a series of capacities. Stiegler opens the door to a more critical relationship to technology, but I wonder if the interplay between the Epimethean incapacity and Promethean capacity does not leave something in tact that should be subject to a de-construction.

The ethic of letting beings be, the resistance of busyness, must also be accompanied by a crucial recognition; that any metaphysical program that holds dominion over an age is also an apparatus that seeks to foreclose on the evasiveness of life. Agamben writes, in his chronicle of the life of Hölderlin, that “[l]ife is purely comprehensible, but precisely because of that, as such, it can never become an object of knowledge” (Agamben 2023, 17).

While there is something admirable in attesting to the impossibility of life being an object of knowledge, there needs to be a slight adjustment. Life is purely evasive, and because of that it can truly never be calcified as an object of metaphysics. The perfect comprehensibility of life is precisely what metaphysics, in its domination of an epoch, claims. It is in this attempt to preclude all escape that one finds our contemporary eugenic horror.  

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References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. (K. Attell, Trans.) Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio. 2023. Holderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life 1806-1843. (A. L. Price, Trans.) New York: Seagull Books.

Cesare, Donatella Di. 2018. Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks. (M. Baca, Trans.) Medford: Polity Press.

Debord, Guy. 1970. The Society of the Spectacle. (F. Perlman, Trans.) Critical Editions.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.) New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.) New York: Harper Collins.

__. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. (W. Lovitt, Trans.) New York: Garland Publishing.

__. 1985. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. (T. Kisiel, Trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Junger, Ernst. 1991. “Total Mobilization.” In R. Wolin & J Golb, Eds. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press. 119-139.

Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. (R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, trans.) Stanford: Stanford UP. 

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[1] In this sense, the decision by certain translators to translate Ge-stell as “positionality” seems like the right one.

[2] We ought to go further and say the social is, itself, a technology. Heidegger intimates as much in his polemic against cultural production in “The Age of the World Picture”.

[3] Minor gripe here, but an important one, utilizing the terms “idiocy and imbecility” among the causes of the first forgetting can intimate that disability is somewhat immediately tied only to an existence prior to or, more worryingly, without technics. Ableist language and political rhetoric is everywhere in this text, and even those who scold, like me, are certainly guilty of having it littered throughout our own analyses, but the stakes here are extremely high, considering this is a book explicitly about anthropogenesis.